SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

One for Dabz/GfK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlPtOe4youc&ab_channel=Noel%27sRetroLab

Yeah, pretty much sums it up... Sneaky suspicion though that that first pacman game thingy in the video had a machine code sprite driver running, and not 100% BASIC!

I never really bothered with using the extra 64kb of memory with my 6128, no reason too, had a dabble with bank switching yeah, but nothing to shout home about, thought it was cool, but, to be honest, a lot of devs didnt either because they used the 464 as the base for games, which obviously ran on every model of the brand... One or two did, but they were few and far between and I think it was there for more productive office type applications.

The disk format... It was okay, had that nice clunky chunky solid feel, but, they were expensive even back in the day, sorta the wrong choice if you ask me, but now, they make an Amstrad... An Amstrad, and there's nothing better then slapping one of them in the drive with a good old clunk, like warm apple pie!

Colour palette, totally agree, bright and breezy over the other micro's, but, since a lot of devs used the speccy as a base for their code and lazily ported games over, loads of potential wasted to make good games look great.

Keyboard... One word... Lush!



Dabz

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Colour palette, totally agree, bright and breezy over the other micro's, but, since a lot of devs used the speccy as a base for their code and lazily ported games over, loads of potential wasted to make good games look great.

Yep I've seen the palette put to good use...But back in the day lazy ports were just clones of Spectrum games - that actually ran slower!  That killed the machine.

Oh aye, I remember giving you that, so you never got it fixered up after all!

And yeah, that "repair" wasnt me, I'm crap at lecky things generally, so dont bother with them, I'm a "Oh, its broke, toss it out and buy another" type!

Dabz

Aww, loved my CPC 6128 and spent many many many hours with Rainbird Art Studio and Rainbird Music Studio. Plus it had a really nice keyboard on par with the Ti-99/4A's.

But as said, it was blighted somewhat by lazy ZX Spectrum ports when the machine as capable of much much more.